1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to manufacturing or other organizational activities in which a multiplicity of tasks are simultaneously balanced against one another to achieve goals of the organization. More specifically, the present invention relates to an apparatus and method for efficiently coordinating the association and allocation of organizational resources to these multiplicity of tasks.
2 Background Art
Organizations, such as manufacturers, perform tasks to achieve organizational goals. In performing tasks, resources are used. For simplicity, a task may be viewed as relating to one of a manufacturer's product lots, and resources may be viewed as valuable commodities, such as raw materials, components, equipment, expendable supplies, computer time, labor, and the like. In general, organization management applies resources to product lots to manufacture finished products.
As organizational complexity increases, management faces a vast number of complicated choices concerning how best to allocate scarce resources to competing lots. Moreover, since a manufacturing environment continually changes, any "best" allocation scheme is valid for only an instant in time. An optimized allocation scheme must change in real time to respond to the changing manufacturing environment. The above-listed "Related Inventions" provide various tools which aid the formation of allocation schemes that best meet overall organization goals.
Whether explicitly or not, an organization assigns or otherwise associates its resources with its product lots. Associations occur whenever resources are actually being expended upon or allocated to a lot. Associations also occur in connection with planning, scheduling and simulating anticipated tasks. These anticipated-task associations generally depict projected uses of resources by product lots.
Various reporting and listing tools and techniques are known for associating resource projections with lot projections. For example, conventional Bill-Of-Material lists associate resources required by a product lot with the product lot itself. In addition, conventional scheduling or planning techniques, such as Critical Path Method (CPM), Project Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), Material Requirements Planning (MRP), and the like, often associate resources such as labor and equipment with product lots. While such conventional reporting and listing tools may be computerized, they nevertheless fail to adequately adapt to the generation, in real time, of resource-lot allocation schemes that best meet overall organization goals.
For example, such conventional resource-lot association techniques are typically not comprehensive enough in scope to supply the informational needs of a resource-lot allocation scheme that encompasses an entire organization's resources and product lots. Often, such techniques encompass only a small portion of an entire organization's resources and product lots. Such incomprehensive techniques are useless for a resource-lot allocation scheme that aims to optimize allocations for an entire organization because they fail to provide resource-lot associations for the entire organization.
Conventional techniques additionally fail to include attributes and precise timing information for a lot's specific uses of resources. For example, a product lot may require the use of an oven resource. Attributes of the oven may describe the oven's temperature and the amount of oven space available for use by the product lot. Timing information describes a projected point in time when the lot initially requires the oven and the duration over which the oven is required. This type of attribute and timing information is useful in optimizing resource-lot allocations because, for example, it provides knowledge for scheduling the simultaneous sharing of a resource, such as the oven, by multiple lots. In addition, such attribute and timing information provides baseline conditions used in simulating the manufacturing environment.
While conventional computerized resource-lot association reporting and listing techniques might possibly be expanded to encompass an entire organization's resources and lots and to include attributes and timing information, such a simple expansion would present serious problems for an organization which has thousands of resources to apply to hundreds of lots. A tremendous amount of computer memory would be required to adequately characterize all potential combinations of resource-lot associations. In addition, a tremendous amount of computer processing capability would be required to continually process the data contained in this tremendous amount of memory, as required by real-time simulation and real time tracking of actual and planned events in the manufacturing environment. Even with current advancements in computer technology, such tremendous memory and processing requirements would render a simple expansion of conventional resource-lot association techniques too expensive and too unreliable for even the largest of manufacturing organizations.